The various guises of translanguaging
On Monday 1stof July, 2019, Ghent University and Lancaster University will jointly host a symposium to critically reflect on the notion of translanguaging. The concept adopts various guises. It is sometimes defined as a practice, sometimes as a pedagogy and sometimes as a challenge to the very notion of language itself. It has gained traction at a time when understanding the relationship between language and knowledge has become ever-more paramount, a time when institutions and individuals navigate a volume of information that is simultaneously overwhelming and curiously gated. Not unproblematically, translanguaging is a concept that allows for but rarely addresses the full range of semiotic resources employed in contemporary communication: its very name retains an overarching lingual bias. Nonetheless, it is a concept that wrestles with important issues connected with issues of power, of identity and of claiming the right to speak.
In this symposium, we will explore the paradoxes of translanguaging – how it is theorized, used and explained. We seek to clarify but also critically evaluate the concept and to engage participants in discussion of their own and our related research.
The symposium is a combination of traditional paper presentations and a series of keynote discussions. Each keynote discussion is facilitated by an academic who works with multilingual communities and has engaged with work on multilingualism, plurilingualism and/or translanguaging.
The conference will take place at Ghent University. The conference theme – the various guises of translanguaging – invites critical reflections on the notion of translanguaging. The aim of this symposium is to bring together researchers working in different disciplines, to collect a variety of perspectives on translanguaging and to stimulate discussion and participation in a day of collaborative inquiry. We invite you to submit an abstract of max 300 words by the 31thof March. Notification of acceptance will be sent out at the end of April. Abstracts should be submitted to translanguaging@ugent.be.